I N Italy, between October I, 1943, and April 1, 1944, while covering our land operations against the Germans as a war correspondent, I saw quite a little of a unit called the 100th Infantry Battalion, which is composed almost entirely of first-generation or second-generation Americans of J apa- nese descent from Hawaii. Recently, on my way to the western Pacific, I saw several men of the 1 OOth Battalion again in Honolulu. They were home on leave. It's very easy, if you're interested, to see these soldiers and their families and friends, and I was interested not only because of old acquaintance but be- cause of certain things that had hap- pened meanwhile, and were still happen- ing, along the Pacific coast of the United States-things that seemed strange and ugly to many people at home. You find, in the Pacific war zone, that there are other people, both civilians and military, to whom these same things- the boycotting of Japanese-American barbershops, the burning of J apanese- American soldiers' houses in California and Oregon-seem neither ugly nor strange. For them our war in the Pacific has made it simple to take the attitude they have taken toward persons of J ap- anese blood everywhere-too simple, maybe. It's lucky for the J apanese- Americans, in away, that one's attitude toward the little racial violences on the West Coast of recent months can also be simplified, or over-simplified, in the opposite direction, for they have nearly an involved Illen with records of serv- ice in the American Army, and these records are good, according to the testi- l110ny of scores of government spokes- men, military leaders, and white com- bat units who have fought alongside the Nisei. (Nisei means, literally, "Those of the first generation." It has come in the western states and in Hawaii to mean all Americans of Japanese descent, in- cluding the Sansei, or " d ." secon generatIon, and it is a handier ex- . h " J pressIon t an apa- nese-Americans" or "Americans of J apa- nese descent.") PlaIn- ly, all issues involving Nisei are not going to be judged in terms of Nisei service men. Op- 46 A RE.POR TE.R AT LARGE. THOS OF THE FIR.ST GENER.A TION ponents of the Nisei, some of them act- ing from theories about labor, agricul- ture, and politics as well as about race, are too alert to let that happen. In the meantime, however, a few American Legion poSts and a few scattered side- walk commandos have brought public attention to the question in a field in which Nisei prestige is strongest. The 100th Battalion's is doubly strong, since all its origirial members, who joined the battle on the Salerno beaches in late September, 1943, were either on active service or reservists before Pearl Harbor. The 442nd Regimen- tal Combat Team, an all-Nisei unit which has been fighting against the Germans in the Alsace sector and in- cludes numbers of post-Pearl Harbor Nisei volunteers, was given a regimen- tal citation last fall for the rescue of a "lost battalion" of very renowned infan trymen from Texas. The latter, sons of a region not unknown for ra- , I....J cial issues, went even further and be- stowed the title of "honorary Texans" upon the Nisei, who had coöperated during several earlier pinches in the Cas- sino valley. It should be mentioned in passing that the Texans themselves, who belonged to the badly battered Thirty- sixth Division, were in many cases " h "" h R 1 onorary 1n t e same sense. ep ace- ments from neighborhoods as remote as Queens had infiltrated into the divi- sion. One of its bravest men, and one who was generally recognized as such when I met him near San Pietro, in Italy, was a tiny lVlexican known to his colleagues by the name of Sweet Pea. The 100th Battalion, which is part of the Thirty-sixth Division, is the Nisei unit I am most familiar with. All its men, without exception, come from Hawaii, and in Hawaii the rela- tions between the Nisei and the haole- Hawaiian for "white man"-are some- what different from those on the Pa- cific Coast. The Japanese-Americans were thirty-seven per cent of Hawaii's prewar population of around four hun- dred thousand. If all people of J ap- anese blood are sinister-and many Ha- waiian whites think they are and had violent suggestions as to what to do about it in the days just after Pearl Har- bor-it may strike you as odd, on the face of it, that actual outbreaks of race resentment have been confined to the mainland and are seen almost not at all in Hawaii. The explanation is that the hundred and fifty thousand Hawai- ian Nisei were never segregated from the life and economy of the whites and other groups, as was the case in the Coast states before the war. Their store- fronts alternated with white and Chi- nese storefronts in Honolulu, their rep- resentatives held government jobs, their workers did the bulk of the labor in the sugar and pineapple industries, which are the basis of the Hawaiian economy. They were, in short, vitally necessary to Hawaiian life. In the Pacific Coast states the Nisei group was small and economically inconsequential and did not share the society of whites, with the result that those whites who disliked them on one ground or another were happy to see them "relocated" inland when the Pacific war began and were pugnaciously resentful when the gov- ernment permitted the Nisei to return to their homes and jobs last year. Hawaii, where the greater part of the Japanese-Americans live, has, how- ever, produced some curious contrasts in its treatment of Nisei. One pattern, the existence of which never occurred to me when I saw the 100th Battalion fighting in / Italy, turns out to be E::::::: fairly common in the islands. The Nisei who has fought abroad and been wounded-which is the case with ninety per cen of the surviv- ing original members of the 100th Battalion- often has a father, brother, or uncle in an Internment camp or a Relocation Center on the n1ainland. Many of '.. ..., './ .. . t.' , t ': ,',': . : '," "., J /; ", :', , ". '" /-' .